4.9. Configuring atime Updates

4.9. Configuring atime Updates

Each file inode and directory inode has three time stamps associated with it:

If atime updates are enabled as they are by default on GFS and other Linux file systems then every time a file is read, its inode needs to be updated.

Because few applications use the information provided by atime, those updates can require a significant amount of unnecessary write traffic and file-locking traffic. That traffic can degrade performance; therefore, it may be preferable to turn off atime updates.

Two methods of reducing the effects of atime updating are available:


Note: This documentation is provided {and copyrighted} by Red Hat®, Inc. and is released via the Open Publication License. The copyright holder has added the further requirement that Distribution of substantively modified versions of this document is prohibited without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. The CentOS project redistributes these original works (in their unmodified form) as a reference for CentOS-4 because CentOS-4 is built from publicly available, open source SRPMS. The documentation is unmodified to be compliant with upstream distribution policy. Neither CentOS-4 nor the CentOS Project are in any way affiliated with or sponsored by Red Hat®, Inc.